‘Loki’ leaps through time, shifts shape in latest exploration into Marvel Multiverse.
Thor’s mischievous brother leaps across centuries in intricate new Disney+ series
“WandaVision” examined the emotional fallout and “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” tackled the political implications of the last two “Avengers” movies. Now “Loki,” the third Disney+ limited series produced by Marvel Studios, takes on the very meanings of time and existence in the superhero Multiverse.
To start, the God of Mischief appears very much alive, even though Thanos unequivocally killed him in 2018’s “Avengers: Infinity War,” with Tom Hiddleston back playing Thor’s 99% evil, magically powered, shapeshifting brother in the new sixchapter show that drops an episode a week beginning Wednesday, June 9. And he’s not alone; other distinguished British actors may also portray differentlooking Lokis from different timelines as the weeks go by — thanks to temporal deviations in the Multiverse that create parallel dimensions, which seem to be the next evolution of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the wake of the “Infinity War” 2019 sequel, “Avengers: Endgame.”
Clear? No? Well, that’s just the start of the confusion that “Loki” mischievously stirs up.
“It was a super easy job,” head writer and executive producer Michael Waldron told The Chronicle, with utter sarcasm, during a video interview from his hometown of Atlanta, where the series was also filmed.
“Look, it is a balancing act of: What
are these time travel rules going to be, and how can we convey them in a way that doesn’t put the audience to sleep? Then there’s identifying tone and everything: What’s the right amount of jokes to put in? Then it’s the execution — the director, Kate Herron (Netflix’s “Sex Education”), and the incredible cast and everybody coming together to keep all of these plates spinning.”
Here’s how we think it works: Though still dead in “Endgame,” during a flashback to 2012 Loki escaped from the Avengers’ captivity by using that handy Tesseract Infinity Stone. However, that move drew the attention of the Time Variance Authority, a previously unknown group in the MCU cosmic bureaucracy that’s responsible for keeping the Sacred Timeline intact. It punishes malefactors, like Loki, who create chaos by
not following their predetermined paths through life.
With his powers nullified and a kind of fourthdimensional shock collar to keep him in line on TVA world, Loki is about to be sentenced to “reset” (i.e. obliterated) by TVA Judge Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu MbathaRaw, costar of the great “Black Mirror” episode “San Junipero”). But one of her agents, the folksy but canny Mobius M. Mobius (Owen Wilson), persuades Renslayer to let Loki help him catch a mysterious villain who is killing TVA minutemen in various past and future epochs. Soon, the bickering odd couple are bouncing through the centuries to Pompeii as the volcano erupts, a 2050 Alabama superstore and other settings, often with hardnosed Hunter B15 (Wunmi Mosaku of “Lovecraft Country”), the least Lokitrusting of those time cops, tagging along.
Loki, by nature, keeps plotting but winds up looking like a fool as much